


[SURVIVE, SCARRED]

by daekie



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar
Genre: Body Horror, Depersonalization, Nonbinary Character, Other, Seeking Mr Eaten's Name (Fallen London)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 01:54:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17235137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daekie/pseuds/daekie
Summary: ...And not enough, not enough.  Still it mourns, and still waits the Sun.(You might have opened the gate. You did not.)





	[SURVIVE, SCARRED]

**Author's Note:**

> happy new year. go become free of the name

The ████ ██████ --  
No, _no_ , they can't lay claim to that title anymore; they left it in the Nadir, just like they left the parts of them that would grieve, pulled it off like a snakeskin and emerged as something else entirely --

(Let's try that again.)

_They_ stand before the Avid Horizon. They had a name, once, but at this point she's nothing and they're not even that; they are a hole in the world, a walking void, their bone and gristle standing vigil at the Chapel and the parts that kept - those are standing here. The wax chills, under their skin, or it would if they could feel anything but the wax-wind cutting through the faux-flesh of them -- they are a mimic, they are a candle, they are a whisper wearing a dead person's skin. Their eyes have long since gone irrigo, peligin, gant, a million colors no human has words to describe; but that's easy, because there's nothing they have left that would make them human.

There are parts of them-that-was that still remember something, but again, they left those in the Nadir to rot. Maybe someone will find that husk and carry it home, and maybe someone will come here and tear them away -- that's funny. That's funny, the idea that someone could save them; they can't think about anything much, but that's funny, and the laugh tears out of their disused throat. If they bled, it would bleed.

The wind carries it away. If they had a heartbeat, it would be so loud in their ears.

They take a step forward, and another, another, another, and they

reach

_out -_

The world shatters before them. They are made hollow. They are unset from the sky and the ground and before-and-after, they are at the end and of the beginning, they are at the finality of them and they are at his betrayal; it is laid out before them, every choice they have made (there was never really any choice at all) in words-without-words and sight-without-sight. They see nothing and know nothing, and they know, they know that there are only four worlds left that they can exist in; a million and a million more pared down to the ones evolving from this moment. Where-they-are is and isn't. It is a place high above time and it is a place that could never exist; but Winking Isle could never exist and does, and it will always be where it is, and they will be everywhere. Are everywhere. They are everyone they could have ever been, and they are only them, the absence of those options; they can see, they can see, they can see - vision unbowed, seeing without knowing, without understanding, their world that their eyes can see impossibly blind and impossibly bright - If they cross that gate, they will be a singularity, a single point in all their lives; they will exist and they will not, but they will go on forever, longer than anything so low on the Chain ever could.

They don't really abide by the Chain anymore, they think, when they think at all. The Chain would still think of them as human. They stopped being human when they ate zee-flesh, and they stopped being human when their chest was fallow and empty and what should have been in there was rich and dark under their teeth, and they stopped being human when the Chapel took them aside and the captain-that-they-were did not return. They stopped being human when they left any part of them that still was to rot, forgotten, in irrigo.

Humans can't do this, after all, and even though their mind is burning fever-bright as they collect their parts from the world-that-isn't to return to their body that they never left, they know that there were four options and now there is only two.

They used to Hate. They used to be so angry, when they were angry at all. But now the teeth that mar their flesh and pull them under could be anyone's, and they were only ever so little. He was only ever so little, and even he's quiet now; the Drowned Man has no song for them, here, as they stand before his only way out and home. They don't hate anymore. They don't grieve anymore. The question sits on their tongue.

It's so close. They really could, if they wanted, but  
  
do they?

  
They can't. Their knuckles tremble, only inches away from the door, and they can't they can't they _can't_.

They have spent so many years waiting, and trying, and bleeding for this, and it is human weakness that drops them to their knees and their hands to their sides, useless, nerveless. She's nothing. They're not even nothing. So how can they still -- how can they still _resist_? How can they still reject, when they've made sure that only the parts of them that would never care to do so remain, have pared the rest off as easily as they once did other things. Like gutting a fish. They are gutted, and empty, and the Knock is impossibly loud in their head as they unspool and crystallize and there is only one world and they have never seen another, _how could they ever think_ \-- but they _don't_ think. Not anymore. Not much.  
They are a reverse, they are an inverse, they are the world turned inside-out and a rejection of everything they could have ever been, and they still can't go home.  
(He's so quiet. There is no song. There is nothing. There is only the dark, and tuneless whispering. It would have been easier to just let go in the Well, wouldn't it? And now they have come so far, and they have disappointed him, and they have only what-is-not to blame.)  
They don't know their own name, anymore, but his name is --

his name is --

"I'm sorry," they say, with their disused voice and their dry mouth, the wax-wind ripping at them, "I'm _sorry,_ ███████, I'm sorry, I _can't_ \--"

It's like a weight lifted from them, like he's unraveling himself from every crevice in them he could hide in, to let them still live, but the Knock is endless in their head and they tap it out on the ground, noiseless, seven beats, so easy, so easy -- they're so cold. They're so cold. The Avid Horizon remains traitorously closed, and they are alone here, and she was never here at all.

They are left empty.

All they see is gant, and the world falls away from them, and they are gone.

(The ship that finds them has no running lights. The ship that finds them has a quiet captain, and he does not speak their name, and he does not speak to them. Of course he doesn't. No matter what they've turned back from, they cannot take back what they've given up, and nobody will ever look at them the same way when anyone looks at them at all. Does he know? Can he feel it under their skin, this lifelike pretense at human flesh and muscle and bone; does he think anything of the sharp, clean scar ringing their neck halfway up and all the way through? Their throat is ruined. They'll never know.

They are so, so cold, and they will never be warm again, for as long as this half-life keeps them alive.)

The mirror refuses to catch their reflection, almost, but beyond the drifting haze and the eaten-out absence they can almost see a glance of their skin and their hair and their eyes; it looks like a person. They're almost a person.

(There is no use for a husk of a person, and the glyphs in their skin will gutter out one day, they think, if they do not sustain them. It will be quiet, and without notice, and they will die like they never came back at all. But for the first time in years, for the first time in a decade, they can think without the constant cause and call sinking bloodied claws into every inch of their mind and drowning them out with promises of being a martyr, a sacrifice, the one to take him home and open the gate and leave all of this behind to become something other and else entirely. It's like being alone in their head. They haven't been alone in their own head for so long.

This is not beyond the sky. They will not go on forever, a fixed point, and they will not be the forgotten martyr for the final cause in the world. They have long since sacrificed anything they could have made of themself to the well.

But if they start at the beginning, if they find someone to be again -- yes. That could work. Maybe they can try to gain back some of what this has stolen from them, and what they have given to it so willingly, not of their own free will.)

They tap out the rhythm on the wall. _Seven_ into _seven_ into _seven_. The captain pales, and the captain turns away in fear, and what's left of them smiles. There would have never been anyone else like them, but this is not the first broken promise; it all started with one, and it will continue, and one day there will be another brave foolish fucking _idiot_ who has given up everything they were to the well, and that one will learn the Knock, too.

But that's not any of their concern anymore. They're _free_.

They're finally, finally free.

**Author's Note:**

>  ***** You have gained **1** x **The Seven-Fold Knock**


End file.
